In the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi assembled a collection of 360 Japanese ivory carvings known as "netsuke." In this grand story, a renowned ceramicist and the fifth generation to inherit the collection traces the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century.

Reviews

"Enthralling . . . [de Waal's] essayistic exploration of his family's past pointedly avoids any sentimentality . . . "The Hare with Amber Eyes "belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory."" --Michael Dirda, "The Washington Post Book World
""At one level [Edmund de Waal] writes in vivid detail of how the fortunes were used to establish the Ephrussis' lavish lives and high positions in Paris and Vienna society. And, as Jews, of their vulnerability: the Paris family shaken by turn-of-the century anti-Semitism surging out of the Dreyfus affair; the Vienna branch utterly destroyed in Hitler's 1937 Anschluss . . . At a deeper level, though, "Hare" is about something more, just as Marcel Proust's masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As with "Remembrance of Things Past," it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony." --Richard Eder, "The Boston Globe
""Absorbing . . . In this book about people who defined themselves by the objects they owned, de Waal demonstrates that human stories are more powerful than even the greatest works of art." --Adam Kirsch, "The New Republic
""Delicately constructed and wonderfully nuanced . . . There are many family memoirs whose stories are as enticing as Edmund de Waal's. There are few, though, whose raw material has been crafted into quite such an engrossing and exquisitely written book as "The Hare with Amber Eyes" . . . One of the great triumphs of "The Hare with Amber Eyes" . . . is not just the assiduous way in which de Waal interrogates his raw evidence--scattered articles and newspaper cuttings, old paintings, forgotten buildings--but the way he summons up different eras so evocatively . . . [De Waal] is, too, as you would expect of a potter, wonderfully tactile in his investigations, interrogating the physical feel of the Ephrussis' different buildings, touching surf